Can we avoid hereditary diseases? Today, medicine allows us to detect the evils that are transmitted from generation to generation. A healthy lifestyle can prevent some bad genes to wake up …

Shortly after 50 years, Peter, engineer, weather, began to think more and more to his father with a persistent discomfort. Suffering from cardiovascular problems, Leon was dead at age 56, struck by a heart attack … Catherine, her older sister, gently mocked the fears of Peter: “Everyone is nervous when approaching the age when their own parents died, it’ll happen the day of your 57 years! “But the anguish of Pierre harbored a fundamental question: Is heredity a fatality? In other words, should we expect to suffer the same ills that his parents?

The body is renewed

“Yes,” respond those who know their weaknesses family and causes of premature death in the family. “Not necessarily” say health professionals. Indeed, modern medicine now allows us to detect our weaknesses and even prevent those we may be the natural heirs: cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cholesterol, but also many cancers – breast, the prostate, colon, skin … “Most people continue to view cancer as a kind of genetic Russian roulette, so that it is not,” has always called David Servan Schreiber. Remains that it is for everyone to play his own map of life taking into account the movements of his body. Our body is constantly changing. It has about 100 000 billion cells. Blood cells or skin, muscle and heart fibroblasts and neurons die and are renewed regularly.

Using carbon-14 dating, Jonas Frisen, a researcher at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden has shown that skin cells are renewed every two weeks, those of the liver, all three hundred to five hundred days, those of skeleton, every ten years. Apart from certain brain areas that remain stable throughout life, we change the body every two years. If we do not actually age our arteries is that they are younger than us! These are the genes that are perpetual regeneration of this maneuver, the process is beneficial in wound healing as such, or is harmful, as in cancerous growth.

“Every chemical reaction in the body, certain genes are activated and others deactivated, explains Philippe Presles , prevention specialist. Unless we have very often the power to influence these mechanisms. Indeed, many diseases are related to combination of susceptibility genes that express themselves, or not, depending on circumstances. It is possible to prevent certain phenomena acting on our lifestyle and our environment. “Examples, Lung cancer, which is activated in over 90% of cases in people who have confronted their bodies with tobacco. Breast cancer that is known can be prevented by certain lifestyle choices: breastfeeding up to six months, a balanced diet. The prostate cancer, including predisposing genes can be modified by three months of healthy eating.